Using fieldsets to separate plugin paramenters in Joomla 2.5

When working with Joomla 2.5 plugins, you may have noticed that some of the parameters are divided into separate parameter types, such as Basic Options and Advanced Options. If you're writing your own Joomla 2.5 plugin, you can do this separation by adding parameters to different fieldsets.

As you can see in the code we have two fieldsets, one named basic and one named more. You can see in the screenshot below how this separates the parameters:

Fieldset Language definitions

You may have noticed from the screenshot that even though we set the second fieldset with a name of "more", it shows as COM_PLUGINS_more_FIELDSET_LABEL. This is because by default there are only a certain set of names that you can use for fieldsets. These names are defined in the following file:

administrator/language/en-GB/en-GB.com_plugins.ini

When looking at en-GB.com_plugins.ini, you can see the following fieldset names are defined: